The Wilderness Page 28

  “When she's three,” he says, “we'll harvest the cherries from the tree, but not 'til then. The laws of kashrut say to wait until the third year, and practise patience.”

  Helen hugs Henry to her.

  “The third year of the tree, Jake, not of Alice. Not all time begins with Alice. The tree's already ten, twenty years old. You've drunk its wine.”

  “You think the birth of a tree is more important than the birth of a child?”

  “We didn't do the same when Henry was born.”

  “Because Henry was born before we even found the tree—”

  “Anyway,” Helen intercepts, “the law of kashrut, what point does it have?”

  “It's about patience and—”

  “Patience and virtue. Yes, yes. Since when did you care about those?” She smiles up at him.

  “It's about observing rituals for their beauty. Why do we celebrate birthdays, or Christmas, or pancake day?”

  She kisses Henry's head.

  “I suppose. It just all seems so obscure, if you know what I mean.”

  “And the Bible isn't?”

  She smiles again, reaches over, and touches Alice's nose with the tip of her finger.

  “We can abstain from cherries for three years for the sake of beauty, and the sake of Alice,” he reasons.

  “And what will we do for the sake of Henry?”

  “Kashrut can be for Henry too, a belated kashrut. We can have it for both of them.”

  “I suppose we can.”

  He touches his daughter's nose in the same place. “She's just as I imagined her.”

  Helen puts her hands over Henry's ears against the gunshots.

  “It's good that you love her so much,” she says.

  It has snowed, and the prison is frozen like a monochrome photograph inside its fences. They make their way towards the entrance where the woman shows something to a guard and their bag is searched, and at that they are allowed along the corridor to the large, hot room. They take a seat at a table with a young man.

  The man reaches his hands across the table and smiles. “You need to get that coat off.”

  Instinctively he hugs the coat to himself in refusal and shakes his head.

  “I'll get us coffee,” the woman says.

  “He always has tea when he's here. Strong and sugary.”

  The young man smiles again and a sweetness passes over his face, a familiarity in the eyes also, in the small upturn at their corners which seems to convey great curiosity in things.

  “She won't leave me alone,” he says to the man when the woman has gone.

  The man winks. “Just as well.”

  He observes the other people in the room, their hunched shoulders and anxious looks; all women. Not for the first time he wonders what he is doing here, thinking it is business perhaps, but then not able to say what business that would be, what he used to do here when he was younger and more important. He scratches around in the embers of a fire long gone out and, finding himself in that disconsolate clueless state that has become home, finally contents himself with turning the buttons on his coat one way and the other to see how far they will twist.

  “I've done a painting,” the man says.

  He smiles brightly. “Oh? That's very nice. Painting. You've done a painting. On the banks of a river, very nice, very nice, well done you, that's good—good, good—that's—”

  A hand on his arm stops the stutter of thought.

  “It's for an exhibition of prisoners' paintings, called Doing Time. I may give it to you and Ellie when the exhibition's finished, if you want it. It's of four animals in a cage—a tiger, a dog, a cat, and a bird. It's a sunny day at the zoo, and the animals are all watching one another. The question is, which will eat which first? Will the tiger eat the dog, will the dog eat the cat, will the cat eat the bird, will the bird fly away? It's called A Matter of Time.”

  Out of the window he can see the reach of the manor house, which is eclipsed from view as the woman puts drinks on the table, and then returns to view when she sits. The bird will of course fly away, he decides, then loses the thought. He takes his cup of tea in his hands and stares at that view, disappearing into a thoughtless blankness. He can hear chatter around him and feels an increasing heat in his hands, as if they are on fire, insulating him against the snow that threads down outside.

  When the man sinks his gaze to the table, just in that moment he is reminded of a time when Henry had fallen asleep at the kitchen table and he had picked him up and taken him to the bedroom, swaddling him in blankets, tucking them around his son's body, surprised at how small it was. Then he had sat on the edge of the bed for an hour or more watching, with a feeling of immense love and protectiveness, his son asleep.

  The most vital thing is to protect one's children. There is no part of the soul or body that is complete without that guardianship, no part that is even alive. He feels the pressure of the sentiment on his cheeks, his shoulders, his eardrums, his bladder. Somewhere in the woods his son is running around shooting an imaginary enemy with an imaginary gun, and soon he will come home needing dinner. The table should be set in preparation; no time here to waste talking to strangers.

  When he looks out restlessly through the window the sight of the manor house catches his eye again, dragged through time, exiled in the present moment.

  “That's funny,” he says, bewildered, and the man and woman turn to him.

  “What's funny?” The woman puts her hand on his thigh.

  “That building was there yesterday, and the day before.”

  The snow goes on weaving patterns before his eyes.

  There is a gunshot. Bang! Henry shouts and his fingers form a gun. Alice wants to try walking but the snow is deeper than her, at least just here. She is now one and a half: how fast the time has gone! She windmills her legs and he clings to her while his wife and Henry follow behind. His wife sings. Honey, and I've decided, love divided in two wont do. Her voice carries out across Quail Woods in clean pleasant lines until it meets the moors.

  “Henry, stay with me,” his wife says.

  “Want to go to Jake.”

  “Stay with me. Jake is looking after Alice.”

  He waits for his wife and son to catch up. His wife is out of breath because of the snow and Henry's five-year-old weight on her hip; he kisses her cold cheek and then Henry's. Henry reaches out for him and he leans back; what can he do or say? He does not want to give his daughter over, and as the snow falls on them he holds her closer, pulling the yellow blanket around her. Joy's recent letters are in his pocket and brushing against his leg as he manoeuvres himself through the snow.

  “And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham, in the edge of the wilderness,” his wife announces. “And they were happy to be encamped in their stone house, and not the glass house. And they found a cherry tree, and its branches were possibilities, possibilities within possibilities. Some possibilities were to become real, and some were to always remain just possible.”

  He smiles at her, stoops, and gathers up a snowball which he throws lightly at a tree. With some effort Helen holds Henry at the end of her reach and turns slowly in the snow, until his weight is too much. She sets him down onto his own feet.

  “And from them came two children, a boy and a girl, and their eyes were as the eyes of doves by the rivers of water, washed with milk—”

  “—and fitly set,” he finishes. “And the snow was milk and the sky was milk and their hearts and brains turned to milk.”

  His wife scoops snow from a tree and throws it at him. They laugh, even Henry laughs. Alice chatters Jape, Jape, like a bird, and a gunshot bounces out across the canopy of branches. It splices the possibilities into sometime and never. He thinks of all those things his life will not be, and wonders what he is without them.

  (And as the snowballs fly in a three-way him-wife-son tangle they seem to break up and spill across the air until the air, the trees, the whole forest are dripping w
ith white milky liquid in which the only colour, just beyond them, is yellow, yellow dress, yellow foam, a pair of yellow shoes surfacing and submerging as the mother and child try to stay afloat.)

  “Want to go to Jake,” Henry grizzles, as Helen hoists him up again to her hip. “Go to Jake.”

  “I'm with Alice at the moment, Hen.” His words come out as steam on the freezing air. “Later you can come to me.”

  His wife observes the now sleeping child on his shoulder, and she scratches her cheek and tightens her hold of Henry.

  “It's good that you love her so much,” she says.

  So then Alice is three, and his wife is walking barefooted along the path in her miniskirt, blotched in the green-and-yellow camouflage of the sunlight as it fights through from above. The overhang of trees sieves the light of its heat. Everywhere there are patches of yellow that force through from nowhere and give the effect of a dream. There is so much yellow that it works its way up his legs as he paddles through it and he feels like he is coming alive.

  He is at his wife's side carrying Alice on his shoulders so that she can become a tree; she threads her fingers through his hair and chirps, Jape, Jape. Henry runs ahead and throws pinecones at targets on trees—a knot in the bark or a red cross painted to mark the tree as fit for felling. Most of the trees are marked.

  He comments that woods are going to be cut down, and Helen replies that it is sad to lose the woods, their lovely woods where they like to come walking.

  To lighten the mood he reminds his family that it's been three years since Alice was born, which means that their three years of kashrut is done. The day is gorgeous, the height of summer and so he suggests that they go home and get up the ladder and pick cherries. They'll make, let's see, a pie.

  Helen crouches and rummages in a bag; she pulls out some cake which she unwraps from its cling film and hands to them. You're eating the yellow sections first, she says as they tuck into the cake. Yes, he explains, because he doesn't like them. So in that case you leave them 'til last. No, he assures her, you save the best 'til last.

  A series of gunshots rupture their debate. There is a war, or there has been a war, or—what?—he doesn't know now, reaching back into the memory is like putting his hand into a box blindfolded, knowing there are objects but not knowing quite what they are. War plays its part, but maybe it is just its steady tick that has never left him. Maybe just the tick of his own maudlin heart.

  Henry points out onto the horizon through the trees and asks why the horizon is so straight. When Helen embarks on an elaborate explanation of God's aligned and unswerving nature, he steps in to tell his son it isn't straight, it just appears that way; but at that point Alice whispers in his ear Jape, I want to pick them, and he loses interest in arguing about horizons.

  Pick the cherries? he asks, and his daughter nods.

  He kisses her cheek, of course, of course, whatever she wants she can have.

  The only ripe cherries will be on the highest branches, Helen says tersely.

  He stands in the middle of the path and closes his eyes to the next stream of gunshots. Helen turns her face up to the sound and shivers as though she wants to run from it all, that beat of darkness that seems to follow them around. When she looks back at him she eyes him curiously and tells him he looks just like a soldier, so serious, dressed in that military light.

  He says he is trying to work out what's on the other side of that sound.

  Peace, she answers. There's nothing quieter than the quiet after noise.

  Jape, Alice whispers again to his ear. I want to pick them.

  And then the next day, there is no Alice, and the cherry tree droops its branches in sympathy, or is it guilt.

  The woman comes into the room, waving her arms: Jake, you have put your clothes in the oven. Jake, you have fed Lucky five times today, she'll die if you don't stop it. Jake, you are wearing one shoe, one slipper; always wearing your coat, like you're about to escape at any minute, take it off. Jake, you are jostling about, do you need the loo? She looks like a mad woman, in and out like this with smoking clothes and dog bowls, getting red in the face as her voice rises.

  “You stole my money,” he tells her coolly. “It was under the bed.”

  Then he is upset—she stole his money! He wrings his hands and frowns at a patch of carpet. And she stole the letters that man had been writing to him, the letters about the… thing—they are not in his pocket, he can't see them, and they were his licence, his goodness, what protected him. She stole his money, his letters!

  “You stole everything!” he fumes.

  “I didn't steal anything.”

  “You stole my money!”

  Then doors slam and silence encroaches, then the sound of tears, then a little while later a tray of food comes, which she lays on his lap. Her eyes are red.

  “I have to have a break for a few days,” she says. “I can't cope. There's a service I heard about and I'm going to see if I can use it, where you can go somewhere for two days while I stay here and have a bit of time alone and you can have some time alone. Without me. In a nice place where you'll get looked after better than you do here.”

  He looks at his hands gripping the edges of the tray, old hands, as if he has been in an accident.

  “I don't want it.”

  “It'll do us good—two days without each other.”

  “I don't want to be without each other.”

  “Just for two days. I need a rest, Jake. I think we both need a rest.”

  “I don't want a rest without each other.”

  “Just for two days.”

  He transfers his grip from the tray to her arms and squeezes. A look of pain and anger passes across her face and she shakes her head: no, it means. Let go of me. He squeezes harder and she closes her eyes.

  “Just for two days,” she says.

  Again, he is faced with his old, frightened hands. I was a child once, he thinks with surprise. How criminal, how sadistic, how preposterous that I am not anymore.

  Outside the window, in all this cold weather, the little girl is gone. Snow falls like blossom.

  STORY OF THE ESCAPE

  “My father, Arnold, has a scar across each cheek. Here, and here.”

  Sara's free hand—the hand that is not holding the gold-rimmed cup—touches one cheek then the other. “Fencing scars, Jacob. From his days at the University of Vienna. Look, let me show you.”

  She crouches under the shelter of a tree and dips her hands into her bag, allowing them to waft through the blackness before she pulls out a photograph.

  “Here, my father.”

  She presents the image to the freezing drizzle of the woods; she shows it to him, to the trees: here is where it all begins, and here you begin.

  He takes one hand from the warmth of his pocket and holds the photograph with her. The baked potatoes that she gave him that morning, to keep his hands warm in his pockets, are only just beginning to lose their heat, and the drizzle is turning to snow.

  Sara touches her father's cheeks, taps them gently as she taps the list of ingredients in a recipe, as if to say, yes then, that makes sense.

  “Do you see them, the scars?”

  Yes, he sees them, the silver glints along his cheekbones.

  Across the treetops a gunshot rings, a deep pungent sound; he throws a pinecone at a target—a leaf in his path—and hits it square.

  “The war is starting,” Sara says. “And things will not be the same again.”

  Her ring clinks against the china of the cup, and her spare hand reaches down to his coat and pulls up the hood. Then she tilts her head back.

  “Look up, Jake, look up at the branches.”

  And so he does, and they walk in this way, looking up at the breaks of light through the bare trees.

  “Patterns within patterns within patterns.” She half smiles, half frowns. Their faces are wet with snow and he wipes his cheeks.

  “My parents should get out of Austria,” she says.
“There's time, and it isn't safe there. All their friends are leaving. I've written to them and asked them to leave. They can come here, we have room.”

  Of course, they don't have room, the lie is obvious and harmless, but the way his mother talks (each statement so mathematically assured) causes him to imagine the Junk somehow expanding to fit the need. Or that somehow these exotic tall people will bring their solid walls and high ceilings with them; their airy space, their time.

  His mother crouches and pulls him gently to crouch opposite her, her hands holding his arms. “Jacob, at school—or anywhere—don't mention that I'm not English, if anybody asks. Nothing about the candles, huh?”

  Though he nods, the words don't seem right from her lips. She has always argued with his father about her right to burn the candles, bake the little sugary triangles, fill their cramped kitchen with the coffee machine that gurgled its foreign language each morning.

  “Don't be scared, no harm will come to us.” She kisses his cheek and the scent of lilies swarms him. “It's just better to pretend you don't know anything. Sometimes it is better to be a fool, my dear. Where you are from, what is yours, what is home—sometimes these are not the point. The truth is not everything. You have to know when it is time to get away.”

  A second, louder gunshot explodes in the distance and bounces through the branches above them.

  “Dreck!” Sara stops and puts her hand to her chest. Coffee spills on the new dust of snow and melts the snow away. It is the gunshot at the start of a race, he thinks, and suddenly the woods are charged with the thought of escape. He and his mother look at each other with a slight excitement, a fever sketched giddily across their faces. The snowflakes are now fat and determined to settle, and he is impressed by how fast they turn the trees white. That letter his mother sent, he supposes, is shuttling across Europe on trains, a beat pulsing along the track like the beat now left in the air after the gunshot.